alt Hacker News> Why would you factor in salary
Say that it turned out that the total cost of the proof of the Erdős unit-distance conjecture was $50 million.
Then the question really becomes: yes, these models are capable of proving important mathematical results, but at a very high cost. Is it worth it?
If a mathematician applied for a research grant of $50M USD for proving the same thing, they would have been laughed out of the bank.
What's more is that when you have a research grant, you train PhDs and postdocs, you hire new staff, and you disseminate. That is, you get much more value for the money spent.
I'm just curious what the cost is.
It feels like the real cost might be negative though.. They use frontier math as a way to test improvements in their model. So solving the problems is like a positive externality, but the important thing is they can verify that the model is improving instead of looking at useless benchmarks. Plus it is good for marketing and attracting talent.